An Infrastructure Foundation to Deliver A World Of Many Clouds

There has been major market traction this past year in the deployment of cloud services, but the discussion still too often focuses on cloud in the singular. Our experience has shown that companies are not typically adopting a single approach to cloud, but rather are embracing a rich set of approaches that provides them with flexibility and control. While many are building private clouds; others are building public clouds, many differentiated on industry specific characteristics. Increasingly, we see organizations using a mix of these options, consuming services from multiple cloud providers as well as building their own private cloud capacity. But, all expect a secure and assured cloud experience. Regular readers of this blog will recognize this as what we at Cisco we refer to as a world of many clouds. IT leaders must be prepared to build or acquire a portfolio of business application services in the world of many clouds.

Each customer’s journey to cloud is unique. A company looking to build a private cloud may begin by consolidating, virtualizing, and automating their infrastructure. Others may look to select a virtual private cloud or managed cloud services. Organizations planning to offer commercial cloud services will need to take a different approach to cloud. They will need to focus on envisioning a portfolio, building out the required infrastructure, ascertaining an effective marketing and sales approach for their services and then quickly iterating their approach based on what they learn in market. All of these cloud models require a sound IT infrastructure. The key to unlocking the full potential of cloud computing is abstracted, open, and programmable infrastructure. Cloud is not only changing the way the business thinks about IT, but the way IT must think about its design.

If you would like to learn more about why long-term cloud value lies in the data center foundation and how to architect today’s and tomorrow’s clouds, please join our panel discussion on the role of infrastructure in cloud computing. This webcast with Cisco’s Jim McHugh and Forrester’s James Staten will take place on December 6 at 9:00 am PST. More details can be found at this site: www.cisco.com/go/ucscloud.

We'd love to hear from you! To earn points and badges for participating in the conversation, join Cisco Social Rewards. Your comment(s) will appear instantly on the live site. Spam, promotional and derogatory comments will be removed.

Some of the individuals posting to this site, including the moderators, work for Cisco Systems. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not of Cisco. The content is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement or representation by Cisco or any other party. This site is available to the public. No information you consider confidential should be posted to this site. By posting you agree to be solely responsible for the content of all information you contribute, link to, or otherwise upload to the Website and release Cisco from any liability related to your use of the Website. You also grant to Cisco a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to sublicense) right to exercise all copyright, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any original content you provide. The comments are moderated. Comments will appear as soon as they are approved by the moderator.